Children of Monsters. Jay Nordlinger
a nice round number, and you might think I aimed for it—or added or subtracted a couple of brutes to arrive at it. In point of fact, I drew up a list of dictators I thought I should survey, and it came to 20. They are all modern dictators, by which I mean, they ruled in the 20th century. (One of them, Fidel Castro, ruled into the 21st. The son of one of them rules Syria right now. The grandson of another one rules North Korea—having taken over from his father, the son of the original dictator.)
I could have gone back to antiquity—Caligula had a child, just one. Her name was Julia Drusilla, and she was a chip off the old block. Suetonius, in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars, writes that Caligula knew she was his own, “for no better reason than her savage temper, which was such that, even in her infancy, she would attack with her nails the face and eyes of the children at play with her.”
The little girl’s parents were murdered on January 24 in 41 AD. She was just a year and a half. She was murdered the same day, her head bashed against a wall.
I could have gone to 16th-century Russia too, when Ivan the Terrible was on the throne. He beat his pregnant daughter-in-law, causing her to miscarry. When his son, the czarevitch, complained, he beat him too, bashing him with his scepter and killing him. The czar and father was immediately horrified by what he had done.
Ivan does not play a part in this book, but Bokassa the First does. He was the self-proclaimed, self-crowned emperor of the Central African Republic, or, as he styled it, the Central African Empire. He beat people to death with a kind of scepter—it was a ceremonial cane or walking stick, made of ebony. I must report, however, that he did not beat a son or daughter, at least not to death.
The book is called “Children of Monsters”—but the dictators are not equal in their monstrousness. Indeed, a few of them are hardly monsters at all. Mobutu of Zaire, for example, was an angel compared with his friend and neighbor Bokassa. Honestly, I feel a little sheepish about including Franco in this book. He was a dictator, and you and I, being good democrats, would not have wanted to live under him. But in the dictator business, we sometimes grade on a curve. Franco was a lamb compared with our genocidal monsters: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al. Yet I have included him because a) he is famous and b) he had a daughter, who is interesting. And c) he was a dictator.
If you yourself had drawn up a list of dictators, it may well have differed from mine. You may fault my book for omissions. From Soviet Europe, I chose two dictators, Hoxha and his Romanian counterpart, Ceauşescu. One could have done East Germany’s Honecker—who joined his family in Chile after his downfall. In the Caribbean, I might have included Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. (He renamed the capital city after himself, a very dictatorial thing to do.)
As a rule, I went for the worst of the lot. You have to be very bad indeed—drenched in blood—to qualify for my book. Sorry to be ghoulish about it, but body count mattered. So, when it comes to Iran, you have Khomeini but not the shah. You and I would not have wanted to live under the shah. But we most likely would have been screaming for him to come back, after experiencing Khomeini and his gang.
This book has an organizational plan, of course, but it may take some explaining. I begin with dictators associated with World War II, plus Franco. I end this section, or grouping, with Tojo—then stay in the Far East, for Mao and Kim. Then I go to Eastern Europe, or Soviet Europe, as I have called it. Then the Caribbean. Then the Arab world. Then Iran. Then Africa. In each group, I tend to start with the dictator who took power first, then proceed chronologically—i.e., in the order of power-taking. This is just a tendency, though, not a hard-and-fast rule.
At the end of the book, I have a coda, if you will: on Pol Pot and his late-in-life daughter.
These sons and daughters of dictators will not get equal time. Some will get page after page, practically a mini-biography. Others will get a sentence or two. This has to do with how interesting or important they are, but it may also have to do with how much we know about them. Svetlana Stalin, for example, is interesting, important, and well-known, all three. She wrote about her life extensively. Other people have written about her, too. Mengistu, the “Stalin of Africa,” had three children. (“Has,” I should say—he is still alive, though not ruling.) About one of the kids, we have three or four scraps. About another, we have two or three scraps. About the third—a son, Tilahun—we have next to nothing. I can give you his name, and not much else.
Let me apologize in advance for some words that will appear in this book, over and over: “apparently,” “evidently,” “reportedly,” “seemingly.” I will write, “The story goes that . . .” and “He is believed to have . . .” No historian or journalist wants to write this way. We want hard facts, not “apparently.” But when it comes to writing about dictators and their families, there is some guesswork, no matter how painstaking one’s investigation is. Writing about Mengistu’s family (to stay with him) is not like writing about Jimmy Carter’s family. Writing about closed societies is not like writing about open societies. Sometimes it’s hard to get the most basic information out of a dictatorship: How many children does the leader have? How many wives has he had? What are their names?
Not until midway through his reign did Mengistu permit an official biography to be printed about himself. About himself, let me emphasize, never mind his family. In Cuba, Fidel Castro forbids his media to mention his family. In 2000, a subhead in the Miami Herald read, “Fidel’s private life with his wife and sons is so secret that even the CIA is left to wonder.” (It is not altogether clear, by the way, that Castro has a wife.) The Kims’ Korea is known as the “Hermit Kingdom.” In truth, we are dealing with many hermit kingdoms.
But there are cracks, leaks, fissures. We have information from defectors, analysts, witnesses, friends, former friends—the principals themselves. In short, we have plenty of information. My job has been to sort it and adjudicate it, and to unearth more of it.
Bear in mind, this is a book about the sons and daughters of dictators, not the dictators themselves. There are biographies—usually many of them—to be had about them. I will do some sketching of them, of course. But this is the children’s hour. In most cases, the children are bit players on the stage of history, not main players. They are footnotes, asides. But they are noteworthy footnotes and asides, and they are human beings—human beings born into a very strange position.
My book is, in part, a psychological study, I suppose. Obviously, there are themes, patterns, and connections among the children. These individuals share that “very strange position.” But they are also that: individuals. And they have coped with their situation in various ways. While I was writing the book, I had lunch with my friend Tom Griesa, a judge in New York, and told him what my subject was. He had just one comment—simple yet oddly profound: “People are interesting.” Yes, they are. Sometimes more interesting than they want to be.
Anyway, this is enough of a prelude. On with the show. We will begin with the most infamous dictator of all. Who really doesn’t belong in this book, a book about children of dictators. Does he?
Hitler had no children. He did not have a wife either, unless you count Eva Braun—the mistress whom he married just before his suicide (and hers). It must have been one of the strangest weddings in history, occurring in the bunker just after midnight. The reception consisted of some champagne, sandwiches, and awkward small talk. Two afternoons later, the newlyweds finished themselves off.
It was Hitler’s conceit that he was really married to his cause, Germany (as he would have thought of it). He had relationships with women, and they were twisted relationships, unsurprisingly. These women had the habit of committing suicide, or attempting to do so. One of his women, in a sense, was his niece, Geli Raubal—daughter of his sister, or half-sister, Angela. Geli came to live with “Uncle Alf” in 1929, when she was 21, and the nature of their relationship has been the subject